Tie the knot, change last name?

Study shows fewer women keeping their maiden names.

Study shows fewer women keeping their maiden names.

April 08, 2006|ERIN MILLER Tribune Staff Writer

Rebecca Waring-Crane didn't set out to keep her family's name as a part of her last name when she was married 19 years ago. "It happened almost accidentally," the South Bend resident said. "Then it was more and more intentional." Waring-Crane and her husband flew to East Africa seven days after their wedding, before she had time to change her last name. Once abroad, where different cultural traditions didn't dictate that women assume their husbands' names, she started realizing the advantages of hyphenating her name. "It's a great choice to have," Waring-Crane said. "It's that sense of heritage and family." Not disappearing April Lidinsky, a professor in the women's studies program at Indiana University South Bend, sees the issue in an even broader light. A woman who keeps her family's name is doing more than protecting her heritage. She's preventing her own disappearance in written records and making it easier for the next generation of women to challenge convention. Lidinsky, who kept her own name when she married in 1989, knows firsthand about the extra explanations that come with the choice. She also saw what happened when her mother, who remains happily married to her father, reverted to her maiden name in the 1970s. "It is a very personal choice," the professor said. "Naming is a power issue. It's also a political issue. Every woman who chooses to participate is one more person perpetuating the idea that that's normal." Long time coming Although suffragettes, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone in the late 19th century and feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, chose to keep or hyphenate their last names, the idea didn't catch on until the 1980s, Lidinsky said. Some governmental institutions have an uncomplicated name retention process -- at the Social Security Administration, any number of names can be added, as long as court documents, such as a marriage license, corroborate the request. Other offices, such as the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, where names can only be entered into three-name fields, perpetuate what Lidinsky called the first-middle- last name standard. "It's both a small and revolutionary thing to do," Lidinsky said of women not changing their last names. "It takes work." Several area women said they notice varying degrees of difficulty in explaining and using their hyphenated or multiple last names. Toni Klatt Ellis decided more than 20 years ago to keep her family's last name. The extra last name can be cumbersome at times, but it's not a choice she regrets. "I had been that person for 23 years," the Mishawaka resident said. "I wasn't ready to not be that person." 'It's not a big deal' Explaining the decision to family, friends and a woman's future spouse can be difficult for some women, but not for Kris Springer. The South Bend woman, who has been married four years, said her soon-to-be husband beat her to the punch when it came to the names discussion. "He said, 'I always assumed you'd keep your name,' " she said. "It's not a big deal." Elizabeth Van Dyke and Scott Jacob chose an even less common solution when they married 17 years ago. They dropped the "Dyke" from her name and added "Van" to his name, creating the combined "Van Jacob" by which their family is now known. Immediate family accepted the combination with few questions, Elizabeth Van Jacob said in an e-mail. "I thought this was a generous compromise on my part since I was giving up part of my last name, while my husband's entire name would remain intact," she wrote. "The majority of people think it is a delightful solution." She said she has never met another couple who combined their last names the way she and her husband did, although she does know two couples who created new last names for their marriage. New life, new name Ken Chambers said creating a new name was one option when he married Karen Chambers in 1994. Instead, the couple decided to keep her name, not his, a decision that was met with less resistance than they might have expected. "I'm in the opinion that a family should have the same name," Chambers said. "She wanted to keep her name." The tradition that women drop their family names when they wed seemed unfair to Chambers. And honoring tradition just because it was tradition didn't appeal to him, either. But he wasn't trying to be a trendsetter. "I think I'm more just a maverick," Chambers said. "I think it's something I wouldn't mind, seeing names become more diverse, but that's not why I did it." The couple had few bureaucratic hassles with implementing Chambers' new name. The biggest challenge came when getting their marriage license. At first, a clerk told the couple Ken Chambers would need to follow the legal change-of-name process, but when asked whether Karen Chambers would have had to go through the same process to change her name at marriage, the answer was no. An employee at the Social Security Administration office thought Ken Chambers' taking his wife's name was "a great idea" and issued a new Social Security card. "Once I got my Social Security number attached to a new name, everything else fell into place," he said. After a few years of popularity, interest in naming alternatives seems to have dropped off, according to a Harvard University professor's study last year reported in the school's news office publication. Claudia Golden, an economics professor and a 2001 Harvard graduate, compared records of women from the 1980s through 2000 and found a drop of 6 percent in the number of women retaining their family names. Less interest in feminism The move back to traditional name taking is a symptom of a generation of Americans less interested in feminism than their forebears, Lidinsky said. The IUSB professor leafing through the first few pages of a recent edition of New York Times Magazine pointed to three advertisements to prove her point. The first showed a scantily clad young woman with objects to buy around her, the second a white-haired man hawking a credit card while sitting among props indicating his intellectual achievements, the third, another scantily clad young woman, this time selling perfume. "I think culture has gotten far more poisonous for young women than it was 10 years ago," Lidinsky said. "You look at these ads and you would never know there are more women in college than men." Eighteen-year-old Sarah Davis doesn't see why a woman changing her name is a big deal and she doesn't hear many of her friends discussing the topic. "I don't think it really matters," the Mishawaka High School graduate said. "You're with the person, no matter what your name. If you love the person, the consensus is you change your name." Phyllis Pratt considered keeping her first married name when she remarried 37 years ago, at a time when most women were changing their names, she said. She thought using her first husband's name would be easier for her four children. Then she thought about hyphenating her name. In the end, Pratt decided to take her new husband's name. "I think, out of respect for what marriage means, you become one flesh, one person," Pratt said. "I think it would be confusing to be married and not have one name."Staff writer Erin Miller: emiller@sbtinfo.com (574) 235-6553